Is there any way to access the Plugin's return?

[ptufail]

I'm building an application with Blazor, and I have a Plugin that returns a List of Articles. The issue is that when I access the response of GetStreamingChatMessageContentsAsync, it returns a string. I can't even receive a valid JSON, because it always adds properties that don't make sense. I would like to have the response typed so that it can be presented differently depending on the type of data.

[moonbox3]

Have you considered using structured outputs? https://github.com/microsoft/semantic-kernel/blob/main/dotnet/samples/Concepts/ChatCompletion/OpenAI_StructuredOutputs.cs

[moonbox3]

Please also have a look at how filters may help you, if you need the immediate result of a function result without having the model provide the final natural language response: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/semantic-kernel/concepts/enterprise-readiness/filters?pivots=programming-language-csharp.

[ptufail]

Hi @moonbox3

First of all, thank you for your response.

I believe the way to go is indeed through Filters. I have already managed to configure them, but I am having an issue with something. I thought it would only proceed past await next(context); after calling all the functions, but that’s not what happens. So, if I set context.Terminate = true; after await next, it will interrupt the sequence of calls.

Is there a way to determine if it is the last function being executed so that I can serialize the data and 'cancel' the OpenAI response?

[dmytrostruk]

Is there a way to determine if it is the last function being executed so that I can serialize the data and 'cancel' the OpenAI response?

@ptufail Yes, you can get a collection of function calls and check its Count:

semantic-kernel/dotnet/samples/Concepts/Filtering/AutoFunctionInvocationFiltering.cs

Lines 104 to 105 in 7b83ffd

	// Example: get information about all functions which will be invoked
	var functionCalls = FunctionCallContent.GetFunctionCalls(context.ChatHistory.Last());

You can also get a sequence index of current function being executed:

semantic-kernel/dotnet/samples/Concepts/Filtering/AutoFunctionInvocationFiltering.cs

Lines 127 to 128 in 7b83ffd

	// Example: get function sequence index
	output.WriteLine($"Function sequence index: {context.FunctionSequenceIndex}");

You can compare both values to understand whether it's the last function or not.